Intro to Inversions

By Darren DeFranco

Hey everybody,

Today we’re going to learn about this new thing called an inversion. The idea is pretty simple – you play a normal chord with a non root chord tone as your lowest note. It’s easier than it sounds. Let’s take a C major chord. The root note is obviously C. But if you play one of the other notes in a C chord, namely E or G, as your lowest note, you’re playing an inversion. If you have the third of the chord (in this case E) as your bass note, the chord is said to be in first inversion. If it’s the fifth of the chord (in this case G) then you have second inversion. And that’s all there really is to it!

Let us know if you have any questions!

Here are a few questions to test your new inversion skills:

1) If I play a D chord with an F# in the bass, what inversion would that be?